


The Night Unending

by Rhaeluna



Series: Bloodborne Fairy Tales [3]
Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, City of Yharnam, Curses, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Deal with a Devil, Dreams and Nightmares, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fairy Tale Style, Gen, Hunters & Hunting, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-24 01:39:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16170968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhaeluna/pseuds/Rhaeluna
Summary: A plain doll observes the founding of the hunter's dream; a dark fairy tale.





	The Night Unending

For as long as the being could remember, it had been an observer. A Doll on the shelf of an infinite dream, a watcher and guardian of the forsaken. It did not feel, and so did not comprehend the vast terror surrounding all sides of its existence, the infinite depths just over the edge of its watchful eye. It did not feel, it was true, and yet it still became aware of a poignant writhing within its chest sometimes, like a call of agony sealed within a jar at its center. 

It was a tool first brought to life by the pleading of a madman. Its consciousness had been aware then, too, in an incomprehensible way. Watching from somewhere deep inside its master as the hunter and his scholar beckoned her down to earth, the corpse of a pale, white haired woman draped in the hunter’s trembling arms. They stood atop a clocktower of immense size, a looming monolith marking the center of a rotting city. The hunter begged the presence for an exchange, anything to bring the woman back to life. The watcher felt its master ache with sorrow, sympathetic to the man’s plight for she too knew the pain of loss, and her insides bloomed at the thought of a surrogate. A chance. It was a supple heat surrounding the watcher on all sides, engulfing it until it burned. 

Channeling the cosmos and stars, the presence of the moon fabricated a new dream from the ether, and drew the hunter in to act as its host. He would remain until his duty was fulfilled, and in exchange he would be granted mercy in his suffering. 

“I’ll come for you, Gehrman,” the scholar said to him as he was drawn through to the cosmos. 

“Please, Laurence. Do not be long.”

He was sundered, the dream billowing around him. He broke apart, his body undone like thread as he was pulled through. He screamed, long and raspy until his life had lessened, his vitality turned feeble. You are my child, now, the presence projected into his mind, carving new unfathomable runes upon his brain, and through this dream you shall create for me another, stronger than before.

And so the watcher awoke for the first time in its endless existence in the form of a Doll. She stood in a flower garden nestled next to a small workshop and a massive, reaching tree. The dream swirled like mist about her, unveiling the new land she stood upon, the blades of grass flattened under her toes. 

She touched her cheek, and felt the push of her face with a rough finger, a layer of skin grown over wood to allow her speech. She was dressed in the fine clothes of a lady, brown and grey with a lovely bonnet. How strange. She found it odd that she even knew she was a she, for by all designs she was beyond such things. Memories informed pieces of her, mannerisms and scraps of identity, glimpses of a life she’d never lived. Hunting, exploring, an adventure with friends. It filled the Doll with nostalgia, the first and only feeling she ever expected to know. Such was her purpose.

The hunter, Gehrman, stood before her, his eyes glossy with haze. He stumbled and caught himself, arms and legs trembling. He appeared to be sweating, and the Doll wondered if he smelled. She had no nose with which to check. 

“Wha-what? Who goes there?” His eyes found her, and the Doll cocked her head, her hands crossed in front of her.

“Hello,” she said, the wooden jaw of her mouth moving slowly under the flesh of her face, “I am your wish given form, good hunter. You are now within a dream, your hunter’s dream, and so you shall be as per your contract.”

“Contract? What? You—you’re the doll I made!” Gehrman strode forward to inspect her, his eyes wild with the blood. “Where is Maria?”

“The girl?” The corpse, the man’s sorrow. “Ah, I feel her.” The Doll glanced down as she held tightly the spot her heart ought to be and felt the flutter of her clothes in the breeze. “I am her shadow, brought to life by your wish.” 

Gehrman grabbed the Doll’s shoulders and shook her. Her joints rattled as he did. “No! No, that’s not right! I asked for her, not you! Bring her back!” 

The Doll frowned, but did not move to stop his violent grasping. “Such a thing is not possible, good hunter. She wanders the hunter’s nightmare, listless with pain and trapped, and cannot be returned to life. I am here in her stead.” Another memory, distant like a phantom in the night. A fishing village, blood covering her head to toe. Tears in the rain. 

Gehrman’s face contorted, and for a moment he looked the same as a beast. “You wretch! Damn you! Where is your master?” He whirled, and drew the great scythe from his back. “Show yourself, beast! Trickster!” 

“You were not tricked, good hunter,” the Doll said quietly. She thought she ought to feel something, then. Regret, fear. Instead there was nothing, and so her words carried like a soft breeze, unhurried. “This is what you asked for. You have her, but now she can be controlled, subdued to your needs,” another flash, a night in bed, the sheets sticky with blood. The doll offered the weary man a smile, but she knew not from where it came, “just as you wished. She’ll never leave you again.”

Gehrman roared, and turned his scythe upon the Doll. A jerk; her head toppled to the ground. She saw nothing. Moment passed, or perhaps millennia. A glow, distant; the watcher dragged itself towards it, bloodied and tired.

She opened her eyes, and saw before her a dream she’d never known, a furious hunter she had no connection to save a listless nostalgia she couldn’t place. To the plain Doll, it was their first meeting. 

She introduced herself, and explained her purpose. The hunter cut her down before she could finish speaking, and the blackness returned. Her memories disappeared again, and upon her resurrection she met again the hunter with which she had no known history. Who was he? 

Again and again, the hunter cut the Doll down, his clothes splattered with her pale, alien blood. She did not feel the pain of death, the pain of his steel cutting her inhuman flesh, but after so many visits to the darkness of oblivion and back a weariness settled over her like thick smog. She couldn’t even remember why. Upon her next resurrection, the Doll did not speak, for she was too tired. 

The hunter flinched, as if he expected her to attack him. After a moment of silence he fell to his knees, sobbing into his hands. His weapon clattered to the cobblestone path beside him, the mist of the dream tangling in his hair. “It’s madness, all madness,” he howled, “Maria, Laurence!” 

The Doll’s master descended from the blood-red sky like a titan and settled behind the hunter, her shape wild and serrated. Tendrils swirled in the air behind her head, behind her back. Pain pricked the Doll’s skull as she caught her master’s unknowable gaze. Bristling at her mere presence, the crying man whirled on the Doll’s master, his scythe drawn for blood.

“You did this! You beast, you fiend! How could you!” He swung, and with a whip of her mighty claws the presence severed his left leg just below the knee. He screamed, and fell to the ground with a thud, clutching the oozing stump. Flecks of red streaked the cobble where he writhed. 

The Doll’s master returned to the sky, the lesson dealt, fading into the miasma of the dream and her warm, red beams of moonlight. Alone with the hunter, the Doll strode towards him, and knelt by his side to rub his back in soothing circles.

“Hunter, hunter, you will hurt yourself.” He twitched, scraping the innards of his open wound and covering his fingers with his own viscera. 

“Damn,” he rasped, “Of all the luck, of all the foolishness. Maria!” 

“Please, allow me to treat you.” With only a little struggle, the Doll bandaged him, and from within the dusty workshop she produced an ancient, rusted wheelchair for him to sit in. She lifted him up, and he settled back, his eyes swimming with tears. A heavy sigh escaped, him, and a blossom of life seemed to seep out from him and vanish into the air.

“What is my duty, then? Doll?” He asked, wringing his hands before his chest. “In this dream?”

“You are to guide paleblood hunters to this place,” she said as she wheeled him up the path to the workshop, “and through the echoes of blood shall they grow in strength, and perhaps one day replace you as our master’s child.”

“Our master?” He snarled, “that thing had a child?”

“Once,” the Doll said, “long ago, but she was lost, and left behind.” 

“Feh,” the hunter spat upon the ground, “Hunters, you say? They shall hunt beasts. I may be trapped, but my work cannot end. Yharnam will be overrun before long, and Laurence needs my help.” He gripped the hand rests of his chair and smeared them with the blood of his wound, still wet. “Your Great One shall not get its wish. I shall use its chosen hunters to fight the scourge, then release them from this dream before they grow too powerful to fall prey to your master.”

The Doll cocked her head. “You would prevent your replacement for all time? It is your only hope of escape.”

The man sagged. “No one else should have to reap the pain of my mistakes.”

“As you wish, good hunter.” The Doll let go of the chair, and walked around the side of it to face him. “If it is not too bold of me to ask, might I have your name?”

The hunter looked at her, and in his eyes the Doll saw longing. Pain. “Gehrman.” 

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Indeed.”

And so the Doll guided paleblood hunters from the waking world into the dream with her messengers, and with her master’s help encouraged them to follow the presence of the moon’s will and gather echoes of blood to strengthen their spirits. Gehrman would compel them to hunt, would free their immortal spirits from the dream to live free amongst the dying once more. He thought himself fighting her will, but it was no matter. Were the hunters unable to kill him, then they were not worth replacing him, and the Doll’s master would remain content with the surrogate she had. 

The cycle continued unbroken as Yharnam sunk into a pit of rotted blood, its buildings crumbling, its people deteriorating. The Doll observed, watching, as the dream churned, unending. Such was her purpose.


End file.
